TAIPEI, Taiwan - Hoping to strike deeper into the CPU market, Via
Technologies will officially unveil its second generation microprocessor at
two upcoming conferences - CeBit (Hannover, Germany) March 25 and WinHEC
(Anaheim, Calif.) March 26. And based on tests claiming that it performs
equitably against Intel's Celeron on commonly used 2D applications, the
company believes it can win 5 to 7 percent market share this year.To reach
such an ambitious goal, Via is sinking deeper roots into emerging markets
like China and India, where it hopes to exploit cracks in the global
strategies of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Key to its plans will be
pushing Information PC designs that bundle the Via Cyrix III, based on the
new Samuel 2 core, with the Via Apollo PLE133 chip set and its integrated
AGP 3D/2D graphics core.
The new Samuel 2 core is the scrappy Taiwanese company's effort to arm
itself anew to do battle for the low end of the PC market with Intel and
AMD. The 1.5-volt, 750-MHz chip will be quickly followed by an 850-MHz
version. Both will be made with a 0.15-micron process, use a 133-MHz
front-side bus and feature 64 kbytes of L2 cache, which the company says
will boost performance by 10 to 30 percent over its predecessor. The Samuel
2 is expected to ship in volume this summer and to have a footprint of 52
mm2. Around the same time, Via predicts it will have a 1-GHz version ready
for sampling, which will be made with a 0.13-micron process.